Sniper: Ghost Warrior

by zeb k Sun Apr 22, 2012 12:54 pm

Today I'm reviewing Sniper: Ghost Warrior, a game more buggy than a rental trailer and about as fun as being pistol whipped to death.

Gameplay
The gameplay is one of the worst aspects of the game, as the game plays like a FPS that wasn't made to be an FPS. For a sniping based game(or I assume it's a sniping based game as the title has "Sniper" in it) you seem to spend a worrying amount of time holding an assault rifle. The game could have been passably fun if they had managed to pull of the FPS aspect of it, how ever they missed it completely. And speaking of missed, the assault rifle that you spend a large amount of time using is about as accurate as a shotgun as long distances, and also the enemy can be extremely hard to spot and to hit, but this only effects you, and the enemy can shoot your a$$ off from halfway across the map with better accuracy with the f--king assault rifle than you have with a sniper. I mean how hard is it to rip of CoD4? Every other FPS game in the last couple years have done it. Can't they just copy and paste it all? Anyway that's just one way the AI is skewed, making some levels of the game very difficult. This is enhanced by how slowly you move. Now this may seem to be an odd point to criticize, but I couldn't not say anything about it. When running flat out trying to find cover from the enemy guys that are somewhere 3 miles away and hitting you every time, you are moving at something between the pace a brain dead snail and the plot of The Craigslist Killer. The sniping is understandably the high point of the game, but it was nothing special that you couldn't find in most other game with some sniping. Plus the bullet doesn't hit where the f--king crosshair is, it hits where this little red dot below the crosshair is. Except it is only there sometimes(don't ask me) and even when it is there it can be very difficult to see, and that has several times led me to think it wasn't there, and miss completely with my silenced sniper, alerting every enemy in 5 miles to my exact location. There is also the normal stealth aspect, where you crawl through bushes and kill people with silenced weapons, but again, it is nothing special.

Story
You play as Sergeant Tyler Wells for the sniping missions, and as Private Anderson for the assault missions. Also you play as some others throughout the game, according to Wikipedia, but I only did the first few missions before I reformated my PC and "forgot" to save the installer for the game. Anyway you are inserted into some country in Latin America, and you have to assassinate some general guy. However he doesn't die(surprise, surprise) having freakin' dodged a sniper bullet(must be taking tips from Neo) and then you go on a long slog to kill him, killing a bunch of your standard FPS terrorists in the process. And at the end I assume you kill him, end some evil government and have a beer. Or something. As I said I didn't finish the thing I wouldn't know, nor do I have any desire to.

Other stuff
The graphics are reasonable, but the levels are so linear and annoying you don't enjoy them. As for the bugs I mentioned, the game is crawling with them. Want a hiding place? How about inside that boulder over there? Except that the enemy will spot you instantly. Sometimes to game would start freezing up at random places, and I'd have to restart it to get it to stop. And more than once I took cover in a hole in the ground only to find that I was trapped there.

So all in all this game is everything from mouse-smashingly frustrating to unplayabley boring. I just has 0 fun playing it. Maybe a sniper addict with a lot of patience would enjoy it, but not me. So I'm giving it a 2 out of 10. And at the average price of 20 bucks or so, you'd be much better off getting something more playable.